The map of Britain is changing forever.

The map of Britain is changing forever.

Ordnance Survey, Britan's national mapping agency, is harnessing the latest digital technology in a radical new multi-million pound framework for referencing geographical information. It's a trailblazing initiative that will affect all walks of life.

It helps the police catch criminals, motorists to plan journeys with in-car navigation, and insurance firms to calculate risk. Fire fighters save lives by finding hydrants more quickly, while water companies track burst pipes across their networks, saving time and precious resources.

In the National Health Service alone, digital mapping boosts the 999 response times of ambulances, helps hospital chiefs source extra beds, and supports vital research into the prevalence of diseases.

Now, Ordnance Survey has begun the countdown to a new generation of incredibly detailed mapping based on a common digital framework.

From autumn 2001 a new range of products and services will be available online 24 hours a day and seven days a week, offering unprecedented uses for the era of e-commerce and mobile technology.

The key aim is to make it easier for public bodies and businesses to pick and mix the mapping they need, merge it with their own data, and link it to that of others. The results are expected to include better value for money, more consistent data, and higher quality services across a broad spectrum of British life.

Ordnance Survey's new, seamless information base, known as the Digital National Framework (DNF), will offer definitive, consistent and maintained referencing of more than two billion man-made and natural landscape features in Britain.

They include everything from forests, roads and rivers down to barns, garden plots, and even postboxes.

Only Ordnance Survey, with mapping detailed enough to show the shapes and outlines of individual buildings and tiny natural features, could attempt such a huge task. Features will be reformatted into self-contained polygons and individually labelled with a 16-digit topographic identifier (TOID), a unique numerical code designed for easy recognition by computers.

A TOID may be seen as a digital hook on which data associated with its feature can be hung. For example, if two organisations hold separate sets of data about the same feature, they could share what they know through a simple exchange of numbers. This could involve anything from property records to environmental data.

The likely range of uses is already impressive, but it should multiply even further as the DNF is taken up. This is because businesses and public bodies will link their information to the TOIDs. So, together with Ordnance Survey's partners, the following applications are possible:

You've just arrived in an unfamiliar town. GPS technology in your palmtop or mobile phone shows your exact location. You could ask it where the nearest hotel is and how to get there. One click on the map and you could find out the room rates, lunch menu, opening times, and entertainment. Once you've left, you could even email comments to the management.
You could buy or sell a house much quicker through a much faster exchange of property records among solicitors, estate agents and government land officials.
Your business, whatever its size, could map in all relevant customer data to a single point of reference. This could help with processing orders, so cutting costs and administration.
Your interactive TV could help you choose the best schools for your children. Pinpointing a school location on a map could reveal data on exam results, projected pupil numbers, and Ofsted reports.
Farmers could link data on the type and yield of a particular crop to a field TOID, easing the burden of paperwork for business and officialdom. They could also 'subdivide' their field management if they want to plant separate crops, using the TOID to link the new records.

Some Ordnance Survey customers are already tasting the future through a trial digital index, the Ordnance Survey National Buildings Dataset (NBDS).

It pinpoints all of Britain's 40 million buildings, including around 15 million without specific postal addresses. Among them are electricity substations, barns, public toilets, gas and oil holders, and non-residential windmills.

The NBDS offers a host of benefits for emergency services, housing associations, utilities, insurers and property management firms. It's uses include statistical analysis, asset management, command and control, pollution analysis, flood risk assessment, and planning.

Once online delivery begins next year, the DNF will be able to supply change-only updates showing where new features have been added or old ones removed. These will keep users' databases permanently in line with those of Ordnance Survey.

For further detais visit http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk